What is Important?

The great late Professor Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School is most celebrated for his work on innovation and his seminal book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, the best-selling book that explored the true source of revolutionary innovations and sort to explain why the established organizations seem to work against innovation.

For me however, Professor Christensen’s best work is perhaps a much less known book titled “How will you measure your life?”. It is a relatively small book, just over 200 pages, but the impact it had on me was profound. The book has come to be one of the most influential books I have ever read. According to the professor, the book was the basis of the last module of his courses for all his MBA classes at Harvard Business School.

I like to think that part of the reason I found the book particularly defining. I had been working for a few years and at the time, was beginning to inculcate habits and form views about some of the most important things in life – family, ethics, work, commitment, relationships, religion and so on.

Below are the key principles I learnt from the book.

1. The importance of deep, meaningful relationships: The book exposes the importance of enduring relationships, recognizing this as one of the “sources of the deepest joy in your life.” These relationships, which could be with family members or friends, require commitment, nurturing and intentional investment. Indeed, one thing that has stuck with me is when he discusses what people will typically say is important and how it oftentimes differ from what they spend the most time on.
   
2. Have your principles and commit to them: “[It is] easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.” This is a sentence I remind myself almost every day. It is not only useful in instances of ethical dilemma, but in most things, even seemingly innocuous decisions like maintaining ones reading schedule vs taking a nap instead.
   He asked a question that he says he always asks his class cohorts, “how do you make sure that you stay out of jail.” This is perhaps an odd question, but he explained that many of his Business School classmates have been sentenced for fraud and that many students who have had great education and were having admirable careers had ended up in jail. These were very brilliant individuals, and no one could have foreseen such outcomes for them.
   As many have come to find out, it starts with seemingly harmless compromises that took them on a one-way street to jail.
   
3. Prioritise your happiness to society’s expectations of you: Societal and peer pressure has oftentimes been the driving force for many people’s ambitions. But Professor Christensen admonished, “the trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.” He encourages instead to always assess and reassess what one commits time and effort to against what the person really wants, independent of what others think of it.
   
4. The best investment in investment in others: “The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”
   As the pledge of Junior Chamber International goes, “…service to humanity is the best work of life.”